The Ledger · Entry 119 · Commerce
Producing content to be found by search engines
ContestedSince 2024Criterion practiceLast reviewed 2026-08-17
Event
On 14 May 2024, Google began showing AI Overviews to users in the United States, placing a generated answer above the list of links, and by November 2025 Chartbeat measured Google search traffic to more than 2,500 publisher sites down about a third year on year.
The craft of writing a page so that a search engine would rank it, then living on the clicks, is being taken apart from both ends. Machines now write much of the competing content, and the engine increasingly answers the question itself. Pew Research followed the browsing of 900 United States adults in March 2025 and found that when an AI summary appeared, people clicked a result on 8 percent of visits against 15 percent without one, and clicked a link inside the summary on 1 percent. What is contested is what replaces it, because attention has not disappeared, it has moved inside the answer, and nobody has settled how a business gets named there or what recourse it has when it is not.